Hopefully none of you are like a RL friend who got super mad at me because I asked him if he knew that the game had combat and unlocked recipes as you skilled up.
I had no idea about these things. I didn't check anything and just jumped in. I'll keep it spoiler free, and I think most things I'd like to say are all on the game description.
I believe I'm on the 6th day now. The Harvest Moon vibes are so strong. My farm name IS "Harvest Moon Farm", so..
I love it how
everything is on a worst shape than Harvest Moon used to be (town damaged, broken buildings at farm, crappy tools).
First thing I did after exploring the UI, getting an initial familiarity with the map/town/NPCs was to carve some paths to the 3 exits of the farm. I also didn't know we could craft stuff, so I made a chest, spread some torches on my paths and damn. This is HM 2016, and I've already got Exhausted 3 times.
What's weird for me is that I used to play HM as a little kid who didn't know english. So I'd have to scan for words I knew in order to know what to do, but it was mostly bruteforce trial-and-error.
Child Gabeux: "Egg", "Lake", "Spirits"...throw an egg at the lake and OH MY GOD MY SCREEN WENT WHITE SORRY MOM.Now I can just jump in and the first thing I think is "What crops has the highest profit ratio and where do I find OP stuff to sell?". I have to block these thoughts and just try to enjoy the game without the insane min-maxing, optimal-strategy my brain seems to like to hunt for when I get a new game. And that feels great.
I'm really enjoying it and the nostalgia is palpable. I'm also happy to know that some quality of life stuff is in, like being able to shift+click to move a whole stack of items and things like that.
I also like that there seems to be stuff (craftable or available for purchase) that can help you with the farm. Won't talk about it, though.
The only thing I felt missing in my ~2 hour gameplay time is some tooltips. There are a skill or another that I'm not 100% sure how to level up, but it somehow did on its own.
And since most NPCs won't talk to you for the rest of the day after you're done talking to them, it'd be nice to have some tooltips when hovering the mouse on them to remind you of their name.
Anyways, there's still a ton of stuff I don't know, but if they implement multiplayer..it will be AWESOME!
I also hope the devs got expansions or DLCs planned, or even modding. The game 'feels' scalable/moddable, if ya know what I mean.
And I'm looking forward to see how livestock works. Hopefully there's some chicken chasing to be had.
But for now, if you enjoyed Harvest Moon or Rune Factory it feels like a must-have. The farm feels huge.
PS: Forgot to mention that there are 112 shirt options on the initial customization screen. Dang.